Readers' Choice Awards: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Readers' Choice Awards are and who runs them

The Readers' Choice Awards are a public-vote recognition program run by Florida Community Association Journal, the trade publication better known as FLCAJ. The ballot sits on the magazine's own website at fcapgroup.com, not on a third-party voting platform, which means every rule, date and category a supporter needs is controlled by the publication itself. The current ballot page sits at the 2025 Readers' Choice Awards page.

The program's vertical is best-of recognition for Florida's community association industry. Service providers working with condominium, homeowner and cooperative associations across the state are nominated, and the magazine's readership casts the deciding votes. Unlike a city paper's general interest poll, the audience here is specific: board members, managers and the vendors who serve them.

The publisher's own history gives the program's scale a concrete anchor. When the first RCA took place in March 2014, 3,800 votes were cast, 155 service providers were nominated, and 37 companies rose to the top to receive awards. Those figures come from the publisher's own account of the program's origins.

Key facts

The dated history: editions, the March window and what is not printed

Six confirmed editions anchor the program's recent run, spanning 2020 through 2025, a stretch that qualifies it as an annual program. Its history reaches further back than that list: the publisher states the first RCA took place in March 2014, with the 3,800 votes, 155 nominees and 37 award-winning companies noted in the section above. The gap between 2014 and 2020 is simply years the publisher's current pages do not enumerate edition by edition.

Within each confirmed cycle, the voting window falls in March. That month is doubly anchored: it is the month the ballot runs, and it is the month the publisher announces winners, since FLCAJ states it proudly announces the Readers' Choice Award winners in its March issue. What the publisher's pages do not print is the day-level open and close date for any cycle; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

Recurrence beyond the confirmed list follows the annual pattern. The most recent confirmed edition is 2025, which makes 2026 the next expected year under the program's established rhythm. No future edition is confirmed until the publisher opens one, and the ballot URL above reflects the 2025 cycle.

One further gap belongs in this history: the publisher describes the ballot as covering industry-related categories but has not published a full category roster on the page, and no per-supporter voting rule appears there either. Both facts are visible only on the ballot itself during an open cycle.

How a supporter votes on the FLCAJ ballot today

Casting a vote here is a simple public action on the magazine's own site. A supporter goes to the ballot page on fcapgroup.com during the March window, reviews the nominated service providers, selects a pick in the categories that matter to them, and submits. Because the host is the publication itself rather than a contest platform, there is no separate platform account, no app and no intermediary step between the reader and the ballot.

What the page does not specify is any limit on repeat voting. FLCAJ has not printed a one-vote-per-person rule, a daily-return requirement or any eligibility restriction on its ballot page, so a supporter's safest course is to vote once and let the ballot's own behavior govern anything further. If the live form blocks a second submission, that is the rule in action for that cycle.

Nominated companies have a role too. The ballot's audience is the magazine's own readership across Florida's community association industry, so a service provider's realistic path to votes runs through its existing clients: the boards and managers who already know the company's work. Sharing the ballot link directly, with a plain request to vote during the window, matches the mechanic exactly. Anything that pushes votes through means the ballot does not support, such as automated submission, sits outside what the publisher describes, and no published rule blesses it.

After submission, the supporter's part is done; results move to the March issue, where the publisher prints the winners.

How this ballot sits beside Florida's other reader polls

Florida carries a dense set of best-of ballots, and the Readers' Choice Awards is the trade-press member of that family. Its siblings on this site are the Best of Florida Awards, the Best of Miami Readers' Poll, Best of Orlando, Best of Tallahassee, Best of the Bay and Best in Destin.

The difference is audience and scope. The city polls ask a general local readership to pick favorite restaurants, shops and services inside one metro. The FLCAJ ballot asks a statewide industry readership to pick service providers in community association work, so a management firm in one Florida city and a roofing contractor in another can compete on the same ballot without either being tied to a single town.

Hosting differs as well. Several siblings run on dedicated contest platforms with their own URL structures and platform-side rules. This program runs on the publisher's own fcapgroup.com domain, which keeps the ballot, the results and the winners announcement inside one publication's ecosystem, from the voting page to the March issue.

Timing also separates them. The March window and the March winners issue give this program a fixed seasonal slot, where city polls often anchor to their own publisher's calendar. A supporter following more than one Florida ballot therefore meets different windows, different hosts and different category logic across the six siblings, and should read each program's own page rather than assuming one set of rules covers the state.

Strengthening support in this program

Support in this ballot comes from one action repeated across an audience: people voting themselves on the fcapgroup.com page during the March window. A nominated company's most productive move is a direct ask to the clients it already serves, since the ballot's voters are Florida community association board members and managers, exactly the people a service provider already works with. A short message with the ballot link, sent early in the window rather than at the end, gives each supporter time to act.

The organizer's published position on outside help is simply absent: FLCAJ has not printed rules on purchased votes, software or bulk submission on its ballot page, so nothing published authorizes those methods and nothing published forbids them. The honest reading is that the ballot expects genuine reader votes, and a campaign built on real clients asking real clients matches that expectation. For a fuller treatment of outreach that fits a public-vote mechanic, see how to get more votes online, and for the wider policy question see whether buying votes is legal.